Dave Matthews

Listening to Brunello Cucinelli is like getting your own personal tutorial with a very glamorous, fatherly professor. He is charming and solicitous, speaking in an urgent, musical voice. Associates say he is both disciplined and happy, as well as extremely meticulous. When it comes to business, he's known as savvy and calculating.

For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possible to me as the brittle twig of a seahorse in the zoo aquarium or the skates lugged up on the lines of cursing Sunday fishermen - skates the shape of old pillowslips with the full, coy lips of women.